Alarm systems such as burglar alarm systems and fire alarm systems aren""t very helpful if they don""t pass their messages quickly to the intended parties. Many alarm systems only pass messages to central monitoring companies and the messages are often coded rather than easily human-readable. With most such systems, only drastic events such as fire or burglary are ever communicated to users, and then only through the central monitoring company. Most other events, such as arming and disarming the alarm system, are ignored by the system or are merely logged by the central monitoring company and otherwise not made available in any general and real-time way to users such as principals of a premises being monitored. It is generally uneconomic to expect that the central monitoring company would consistently report all events of interest to users, rather than reporting only drastic events.
It is desirable to provide an improved system in which alarm events of interest are communicated to users even when they are routine events which a central monitoring company would not wish to spend time communicating to users. It is desirable to provide such a capability in existing alarm systems. It is desirable to provide messages in such a system which are human-readable and which indicate in human-readable form information about the users associated with particular events such as arming or disarming the system.
A method and apparatus reports alarm events detected by an alarm system having a plurality of users, each user having a name and identified by an identifier other than the name. The system detects an event of interest relating to a user, creates a data stream indicative of the event and indicative of the identifier of the user, extracts from the data stream the identifier of the user, determines the name of the user based upon the identifier of the user, selects a message recipient based upon the event of interest, creates a text message addressed to the selected message recipient, the text message communicating the name of the user and communicating information indicative of the event of interest, and transmits the text message via a global communications network.